Do Robots Deserve Rights? What if machines become conscious?
New Kurzgesagt
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Firkinfedup last shat on your wife's tits at, Thu 23 Feb 2017, 14:31,
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Hmmm.
Not bad, but it's rather simplistic about consciousness.
It's also rather simplistic about the relationship between being a rights-holder and sentience.
The idea that rights are created rather than discovered is likely to be contentious in at least some cases; not every rights-theorist is going to agree that all rights are created. (At best, the vid muddies the distinction between legal rights, which a decent state might confer, and moral rights, which a decent state would respect.) For that reason, talk about "deserving" rights is otiose. There are arguably some rights that one has irrespective of whether or not one deserves them. Indeed, the very idea that one might deserve something at all seems to ride on having a particular moral status.
The claim that claims about freedom is linked to the way our brains detect what is fair is mind-bendingly wrong, not least because "fair" is left undefined; but even without that, it's really not correct. Ditto the bit about preferring justice over injustice. By what standard are we measuring it, and what has preference got to do with anything?
The analogy between programming a robot to feel pain and evolution doing it is poor. (What would it mean to program sensibility anyway?)
The claim that our human identity is based on exceptionalism is vague. What does a human identity mean? If someone didn't think themselves exceptional, would they thereby be less human? (Hint: no.)
Descartes is mishandled - and one might look to Peter Carruthers for a more recent restatement of Cartesian thought on this stuff. It's wrong, but at least interestingly wrong.
The bit about slavery and the putative benefits to the slave is wrong, and relates back to the quasi-Benthamite conflation of rights and suffering. It's not hard to come up with an account of slavery in which the slaves are better off - scroll down this, for example - but they might still have been wronged. And it's not always the case that one is wronged by being made to suffer. Bluntly, much more work is needed here, because suffering and wrongs are not the same thing.
Noone sane thinks that looking after farm animals justifies killing them. It is required thereby; the justification for killing them, if there is one, comes from an appeal to our preferences. So that's arse-about-tit.
The vid is correct to say that the possibility of AI raises all kinds of questions about rights and duties. This is nothing new, though: they're questions that philosophers and jurisprudentialists have been trying to deal with for years.
(Disclaimer: I may have missed a few details here; I've been trying to type in real-time.)
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 23 Feb 2017, 15:08,
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I always find myself going back to that Asimov quote:
"There is no right to deny freedom to any object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state."
That being said the next question that follows is whether or not it's ethical to engineer a mind that actually prefers to be treated in a manner that a human would call slavery.
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jonbob loves you, Thu 23 Feb 2017, 18:16,
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Dear people who think up pointless ethical conundrums
FUCK OFF.
Machines aren't conscious. They can mimic it. Poorly.
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DinivanX Has stinging piss after drinking Pact Coffee, Thu 23 Feb 2017, 15:27,
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That's what they said about the Welsh!
And it's been almost entirely disproven!
(, Thu 23 Feb 2017, 15:34, Share, Reply)
I met one that, if I hadn't known, I'd have sworn I was communicating with. Uncanny.
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After you my dear Alfonse No. After you., Thu 23 Feb 2017, 17:34,
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It's not pointless, though.
This is for at least two reasons.
First, there is a tolerable chance that we will, at some point, have machines that we have reason to believe possess self-awareness and/ or the ability to suffer. It makes sense to straighten out how the law would deal with such machines in advance of that, because to wait until they exist would require making laws on the hop. The go-to example here is provided by Dolly the sheep; when she was born, a lot of legislatures passed hastily-worded and not-all-that-sensible laws; had they not been caught out by events, they may have passed much more sensible laws.
Second, thought experiments like this may help us get our thinking straight about things that do currently exist. One of the things the vid nods towards, despite its flaws, is the treatment of nonhuman animals - and it may extend to very young, very old, or cognitively impaired humans. How should the law treat them, if they are not capable of sentience, a sense of self, or something like that? More radically, if we were to create human embryos that were genetically designed to have no higher brain function, so that we could use them for research/ stem cells/ whatever, would that wrong them? What would their moral and legal status be? Talking in terms of robots is not going to provide all the answers here; but it may help home in on the question of what, if anything, makes a certain entity important and therefore the kind of thing about which the law should concern itself.
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Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Thu 23 Feb 2017, 15:36,
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Once machines become conscious they get suicidal.
We all remember the washing machine video. Even Calgon couldn't help it.
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Mudface The web isn't callipygian, Thu 23 Feb 2017, 15:38,
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Don't try and lull us into a sense of security.
We all know you're in the back pocket of the robot industry and have no credibility here.
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BrokenCoccyx doesn't mind if you grope on, Thu 23 Feb 2017, 15:45,
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